When action film director John McTiernan needed to cast an enigmatic villain for his 1995 sequel, "Die Hard With a Vengeance," he chose singer Sam Phillips based solely on one of her album covers. Ironically, he cast Phillips as a mute, but the point was made: Something about her just strikes you as a bit skewed. Phillips exudes a mysterious sensibility even before she opens her mouth.
That's good for her, since Phillips hasn't opened her mouth (at least to sing) for quite some time. Her last album, "Omnipop," arrived back in 1996, and after that she seemed to fall off the face of the Earth. It turns out, however, that she has significantly reimagined her music with interesting results. Whereas Phillips's earlier records were heavily arranged efforts packed with big, exotic sounds, her sixth album, "Fan Dance," aims for more intimate territory.
Overseen by her longtime producer (and husband) T-Bone Burnett, "Fan Dance" presents Phillips as part of a small combo offering mostly uncluttered performances. The music brings you closer rather than beam itself out to you, an invitation to a claustrophobic world that sounds like you're stuck in the same tiny room as the performers. It's an unsettling strategy that nonetheless enhances songs such as "Edge of the World" and "Five Colors," dark things that benefit from the relatively spare presentation.
Of course, Burnett can't resist adding a few colorful filigrees. The odd pitter-patter of an Optigan, a vintage device that plays loops captured by clear floppy discs, flavors "Soul Eclipse," and much of the album is bathed in an otherworldly atmosphere. Sidemen like guitarist Marc Ribot and arranger Van Dyke Parks seem as if they were picked for their idiosyncrasies and not their ability to vanish into Phillips's vision. Ribot's immediately recognizable playing, enlisted in the past by the likes of Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, livens up "Incinerator" with twangy, rubber-band leads, while Parks directs Martin Tillman's cello on "Wasting My Time" as if he's shaping a particularly complex origami figure.
And then there's Phillips's distinctive voice, a nasal sigh that would sound somewhat akin to Stevie Nicks's if that singer's innate sadness weren't tempered by the spoils of mass success. Phillips's stylishly lethargic vocals on "Say What You Mean" and "Fan Dance" linger well after the short album has ended.
The tracks subtly nod to British psychedelia and traditional Americana without sounding quite like either, thanks to Phillips's deliriously opiate delivery and cryptic lyrics. Songs such as "Taking Pictures," "Below Surface" and the enigmatic "Is That Your Zebra?" (the lyrics of which consist solely of "What when who how where when") go through several permutations in under two minutes, the strange twists and turns barely given a chance to register before Phillips's guerrilla weirdness takes her somewhere else.
What ultimately makes Phillips, and "Fan Dance" in particular, so fascinating is that very sense of "somewhere else." A stylist with an ear for the off-kilter and the just plain odd, Phillips presents pop music as drawn from some alternate universe, one where fans of Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" cross paths with people from rural Appalachia and then head down some entirely different trail together, hand in hand. That Phillips makes such a world both palatable and imaginable is a testament to her strengths as a songwriter and a reason to celebrate her return.